Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

EVENTS

Consciousness-raising is usually a pretty difficult thing, especially if you’re trying to become a presence in a community to which you’re only peripherally involved, and the event that inclines you toward trying to do so also gets you irritated or annoyed or angry. Given the circumstances, I think General Zoi probably did about as well as I might have managed myself.

Since it was just the three of us, we were kind of just sitting around having rather stilted conversation, waiting for other people to show up. The organizer started talking about other people who had RSVPed. I do not recall what exactly prompted him to say this, and I really wish I could, but he suddenly said, “One of the people coming is a trap. They used to be a guy.”

There is, suddenly, a lot of to-do about TJ Kincaid, also known as The Amazing Atheist, a provincial and prejudiced man who believes himself to be superior to others by virtue of having figured out the question of God (e.g., “there isn’t one”). A lot of people who have otherwise ignored his rants are tuning in now that he’s flamed out so spectacularly over at Reddit, you know, like you do. And most of the criticism is, as it turns out, about the fact that he appears to be suffering from a bigotry version of the Dunning Kruger effect. I think this is close to the mark, but does not go quite far enough.

Russell Glasser of The Atheist Experience passed around the Freethought Blogs back channel a preview of his most recent post, where the events over at Reddit are covered in excruciating detail. Among other things, he said the following to a rape victim (below the fold):[Read more…]